Published: May 08, 2008 11:00 am         

Longfellow, across the years

Thanks, friends, for your reactions to my recent column on learning language. Phone calls, emails, letters — that was the biggest response that I’ve ever had to one column. And, bless you, all of it was positive. I guess that means that Ebonics fans don’t read the Crier. Or can’t.

Many responses were from people about my age. They affectionately reminisced about being taught language by the “Margaret Jones Method,” which had them wrestling with texts that were slightly beyond them and sweating bullets as they recited memorized poems in front of the class. Without exception, these folks spoke of their long-ago teachers with gratitude.

Other responses came from retired English teachers. These said that they’d carried on that effective way of teaching as long as they could. Until, that is, they were overwhelmed with cries of “That’s too hard!“

The cries had come from the students (they always have), but suddenly from parents and, shame on them, from school administrators. These last had knuckled under to parental complaints or had fallen victim to the new watchwords: “Teach each to their (sic) capacity,” and “Self-esteem leads to learning.” Oh, my. Where to start?

Don’t those pacing the educational quarterdecks know that, EVERYWHERE ELSE IN LIFE, raising the bar is a way to improve performance? And don’t they understand that their second slogan is exactly backward?

Self-esteem is a byproduct of accomplishment. And accomplishment results from work that can be challenging and (dare I say it?) even painful.

(I was cheered to hear from a friend and veteran teacher, Hilda Wilcox of Cooperstown, that she’s recently gone back to requiring some memorization from her SUCO composition and literature students. Hurray for you, Hilda! You go, girl!) Other responders raised a dimension of language-teaching that I failed to mention:

the importance of being read to. Oldsters recalled with pleasure how their one-room schoolteachers, often on overcast winter afternoons when the classroom’s natural light was poor, would draw them close around the stove and read to them from “Treasure Island” or “A Tale of Two Cities.” What a great way to teach how sounds, rhythms, emphasis, and intonation all make for enjoying good writing, and for producing it, too.

I also heard from a lot of English teachers still in the trenches, who grieved about addressing inert bodies that intend to stay just that way. (“I feel like a battery trying to jump-start two-dozen cars,” said one.)

Many of those inert youngsters, I’d guess, had begun school without essential work by their first teachers: their parents. Here’s part of an email from one of my former students, now a grandpa (yikes!) down near Philadelphia: “My niece is a teacher in a Chester City charter school. She speaks of children coming to kindergarten, who do not even know how a book is held, or that the pages move left to right, let alone that a line is read left to right.

“The other thing that surprised her was the limited vocabulary of the children. They will use one word and give it multiple meanings. Amazingly, many of them do respond; but for some, the damage is such they will never catch up.” (Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the frustration of a cramped vocabulary that makes them wear out that all-purpose obscenity. It’s to fill in the blanks.) But, imagine: Kids who don’t know a book’s front from its back, or how to open one.

Kids who use “horsy” to denote any animal with four legs; who use “birdie” for anything with wings, from a baby chick to an ostrich. These are kids who were starved of language, and at the age when they could have been drinking it in like mother’s milk.

Once I heard a well-known pediatrician questioned by a young mother; she had her 18-month-old in her lap.

“When,” she asked, “should I begin reading to my baby?” The doctor smiled gently. “It should have been back around your seventh month. He was hearing sounds back then, and he could have begun internalizing rhythms.”

The very best of your responses, friends, came from a man who sometimes swims the same time I do. He’s about 80, I’d guess; but, though we often wave encouragement to one another across the lanes, I don’t know his name.

Last week I was out of the pool and taking a shower, and so was he. The shower room was otherwise empty, and silent except for the rush of water and the harrumphing and snorting that older men seem to do under running water. But suddenly his harrumphing stopped, and through the steamy air came a strong baritone.

“I read that column about memorizing. Listen to this: “‘Life is real! Life is earnest!/ And the grave is not its goal./ Dust thou art, to dust returnest/ was not written of the soul.’” It was a beautiful recitation, not sing-song, but with careful emphasis on “real,” “earnest,” “not,” “art,” “returnest,” “not,” and “soul.”

“I got that whole poem down 65 years ago,” he said, “in Miss Daly’s class. It’s always stuck with me, but I can’t remember the title.” Well, I’d learned the poem about the same time, under Sister Alowine’s mournful glare. “It’s Longfellow,” I said. “‘A Psalm of Life.’” “That’s it!” he said, slapping a wet foot on the tile; and he began to recite again, from the top, with me joining in: “Tell me not in mournful numbers/ Life is but a weary dream./ For the soul is dead that slumbers,/ And things are not as they seem.” On we recited in unison, till we got to the last verse, which neither of us could remember.

“Never mind,” he said.

“It’ll come back to one of us.” And it did. Standing at my locker, I shouted back toward the shower room, “Let us, then, be up and doing ...” His voice boomed back, joining mine. “With a heart for any fate,/ Still achieving, still pursuing,/ Learn to labor and to wait.”

Somewhere, I hope, prim Miss Daly, Margaret Jones, and even gloomy Sister Alowine smiled in approval, delicately overlooking that it was two naked old dodderers who were reciting. Comrades- in-arms, that trio had worked hard for their students; they’d worked them pretty hard, too. And the work had stuck.

Learn about Jim Atwell’s book, “From Fly Creek — Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country” at www.JimAtwell. com. Longfellow, across the years